Mystery Villa (14 page)

‘Why Glasgow?'

‘He has a sister there, who had promised to help him if only he would try to keep straight. When I found him – I had his photo with me, and I soon got on his track – he had bought another barrow and done a fair deal in grapefruit, and seemed quite cheery and hopeful. It almost seems as if that soft-hearted gentleman's tenner might turn out a good investment.'

‘More than he deserves,' declared Mitchell. ‘I suppose Conway stuck to it he wouldn't tell who it was?'

‘Oh, yes, sir,' answered Bobby. ‘Even when I made a guess, he wouldn't say, and when I said most likely the soft-hearted gentleman's initial wasn't in the first half of the alphabet from A to L, or even in the second half from N to Z, he wouldn't answer. But he did want to know if I got my umbrella back all right – though I don't know what made him ask that – and then he had the impudence to say he never could stand being preached at.'

‘Don't blame him,' said Mitchell. ‘Being preached at just naturally brings out all the worst there is in all of us. Whenever you are tempted again to preach–'

‘I'll remember my umbrella sir,' Bobby promised meekly. ‘And more especially,' he added, looking rather rueful now, ‘how Con said he hoped it would be a lesson to me, because even if one gentleman did stand another the price of a doss that didn't give him any right to hand out uplift as well. So I said if ever I got him alone on a dark night I would give him uplift all right, but I would let him off if he told me just what it was scared him so bad that night. But he shut his mouth tight and said there was nothing doing; and then I said it would give Mr Mitchell a leg up in his work if he did, and Con said that was different. He asked me if I had seen tales in the papers about someone they call on the evening placards “The Mad Millionaire”. It's somebody who every now and then gives away money at random without anyone having any idea who it is. Sometimes it's to “down-and-outs” on the Embankment, or it's thrown to men queuing up outside a Salvation Army centre. It's always managed so no one can ever spot where the money comes from, but Con heard as a kind of joke that one man had thought he had been clever enough to track the donor home, and then at the last moment found out he had only been following a poor old woman who lived all alone at Brush Hill, and who must have been passing by accident when the money was being distributed – it was pound notes in envelopes on the Embankment seats that time. But Con has got some brains of his own, and it struck him this yarn about the old woman might be worth following up, even if the first fellow hadn't thought so. He went off to Brush Hill, and when he found there really was an eccentric old woman living in the district he thought he would have a look at her. There was a light in a window of the house where he had been told she was living, and a gutter-pipe that passed near the window. So he shinned up it, and when he looked in he says he saw a tiny little old, old woman, dressed up like a bride – white satin and wreath of faded orange-blossom and a long lace veil – and then, while he was still staring, she opened the Saratoga trunk, and Con saw what was inside. He was pretty well scared out of his senses already, but what finished him was that she turned round and saw him and beckoned to him to come inside. He says she called something about having been waiting for him or expecting him, and now at last he had come – and if you ask me, sir, I think Con was so scared he made sure if he wasn't off pretty quick she would have him shut up inside a trunk, too. I suppose it really was a pretty weird sort of scene – the open trunk, the dead man in it, the old woman in her bridal array, all half visible by the light of one guttering candle. Anyhow, Con slid to the ground and made off as fast as he could, half persuaded she would follow and catch him if he didn't look out.'

‘I suppose it was enough to give him a bit of a scare,' Mitchell agreed.

‘He wasn't anxious to tell anyone,' Bobby continued, ‘for fear of being asked what he was doing up that gutter-pipe. And he says she was wearing round her neck, hanging down over her bride's frock, a pearl necklace he will swear was worth ten thousand at least, and probably more.'

‘The dickens she was!' Mitchell exclaimed. ‘If that's right...'

‘Con was quite positive about it,' Bobby said. ‘I think it's been a good deal on his mind. What he said was, it wasn't fair to blokes like him for old parties what was dotty to be going round with bits of all right only waiting to be picked up what any honest fence would stump up five thou for on the nail. I think myself that's partly why he went off to Glasgow, so as to be as far away from temptation as possible.'

‘Shouldn't wonder,' agreed Mitchell. ‘It does sound as if that's where the pearl you found came from. Bad enough when a woman's missing, makes it worse when there's a £10,000 necklace vanished as well. I don't like the whole thing,' he burst out. ‘I don't understand what's been happening, and I don't much want to find the poor old thing herself, and yet I've a feeling that we must.'

‘No one will want to be hard on her, after all these years,' Bobby said.

Mitchell looked at him gloomily.

‘Likely enough the fellow in the trunk deserved all he got,' he said. ‘And, if she killed him, she's paid for it, living like that. Paid in full, perhaps – yet, is murder ever paid in full? But I don't like it about that necklace. Do you think Con talked about it to anyone?'

‘He said not, sir. I think I believe him.'

‘I'm thinking about that young man with the pistol – who he was, and where he comes in,' Mitchell said slowly. ‘And why is there only one satin shoe left of the bride's dress Con says she was wearing? Can you tell me that?'

Bobby looked a little vague, for he did not at the moment quite see that what had become of the bridal dress mattered very much – it was Miss Barton herself, not her clothing, they had to find. Mitchell went on, referring to some papers on his desk:

‘We've traced sales of jewellery to Allen & Wildman, the Bond Street jewellers, that look like deals with Miss Barton. Allen & Wildman say they have been buying for something like forty years from a mysterious client who answers very well to Miss Barton's description. She used to come every year or two – never bargained; wouldn't give any name or address: took what was offered in gold at first, and latterly in pound notes, and went off. It rather looks as if she made it a practice to keep enough for herself for a year or two – the way she lived she can't have spent more than two or three bob a week – and gave the rest away.'

‘That would mean she is probably “The Mad Millionaire” of the evening-paper placards?' Bobby asked.

‘Almost certain, I think,' Mitchell said. ‘One way she had of making amends, I suppose. Apparently the jewellers never made any enquiry. They had been buying stuff from her for so long, and there had never been any trouble, so they began to take it for granted it was all right. Possibly they made enquiries at first, but there's no record. They have promised to get out full details as far back as possible, but some of their early books were destroyed in a fire a few years ago.' Mitchell paused, and drummed on the table with his fingers. ‘Well, we know now what scared Con Conway. But has he told all the truth? For him a necklace like that would be like a saucer of cream shoved under a cat's nose. Had the girl who opened the door to you seen the same thing, and is that what frightened her — or was it something else altogether? And what about the fellow in plus-fours Mrs Rice saw hanging about Tudor Lodge? Was he just a curious passer-by, or was he someone who had heard about Con's experience and had come along to see what he could pick up for himself? And then, what about the young man with the pistol? And why have none of them come forward now the papers have splashed the story – especially the man in plus-fours, if he was only an innocent passer-by? They can't all three of them be afraid of being asked what they were doing there, can they?'

It was a question to which, as Bobby knew not what response to make, he offered no reply.

The newspapers had indeed ‘splashed' the story to good purpose, and the public imagination had been deeply stirred by the tale of the woman whose romance of so long ago had ended in so tragical a manner, who for so long had guarded so terrible a secret, who now, it seemed, was identified with the unknown benefactor whose showers of gold and notes had at intervals during recent years fallen like the manna of heaven upon the desolate and the outcast of London, and who, finally, had vanished from human ken.

Public sympathy was almost entirely on her side. A flood of correspondence descended on the papers, on the Home Office, and on Scotland Yard, suggesting, imploring, almost commanding, that no further official action should be taken. It had all happened so long ago, the writers of these letters urged, the penalty paid by that long life of solitude and privation had been so great, surely now the veil could be drawn over the past. Other correspondents suggested that there was and could be no proof of what had actually happened. It might well have been a case of accident or suicide, they argued, or, if it was murder, then someone else might have been the assassin. In fact the picture of the solitary recluse dressed in the wedding attire of her youth, of the marriage feast spread and ready to which no guest had ever sat down, had moved profoundly the soft heart of the great British public.

The climax was reached when the author of the tremendously, almost fantastically, popular ‘Up the Garden Path' series reconstructed the probable course of events in an article that doubled the circulation of
Sunday Photos
– already well into its fourth million – and caused so many tears to be shed that no wonder the Air Ministry was able to report, next day, the breaking of a ten-days' drought.

The theory thus put forward was that the unfortunate inmate of the Saratoga trunk had committed suicide in a moment of passionate, unbearable ecstasy because he had felt that their love was too perfect a thing to be soiled by contact with the common life. Alternatively, as the lawyers say, the writer suggested accident. This, he pointed out, would account for the position of the wound in the crown of the head. The victim had been prostrate in reverent adoration at his mistress's feet when a loaded revolver had been discharged by some unlucky accidental movement and the fatal wound inflicted.

The
Daily Announcer
, fulfilling its function, as a great national moulder of opinion, to follow with loud cries of leadership whithersoever the public happened to wander, supported in a very clearly and closely reasoned article the theory of accident, and a prominent member of Parliament suggested that the police might well turn their attention from their efforts to hound down a most unhappy and unfortunate lady to protecting motorists from the wanton efforts of the undisciplined pedestrian to hamper them by getting in their way.

Public sympathy, it is true, received a slight shock when it was announced that the mummified condition of the body was – in part, at least – due to the presence of arsenic in large quantities. A heavy dose must have been taken, declared the report of the Home Office analyst, shortly before death. But as the
Daily Announcer
– after a brief pause to make quite sure which way the cat of public feeling was going to jump – pointed out, in a special article by the ‘Up the Garden Path' author (bribed away from
Sunday Photos
by a kind of film-star fee), this discovery in no way affected the accident theory, since every day cases are reported of poison drunk in error, and obviously did not touch the suicide theory, since a broken heart may turn as well to arsenic as to pistol. In a peroration which has become almost a classic for its grave and solemn beauty and the tender restraint of its language, the writer made the final suggestion that possibly the arsenic had been administered after death in order that the body of the loved one might be preserved – eternal companion and everlasting symbol of ‘what might have been'.

‘All of which guff,' observed Mitchell, reading it with keen appreciation, ‘ought to make someone come forward. No one can believe now that the old lady is in any danger of the gallows – why, it's all odds, when we do find her, the paper will offer her a complimentary banquet and a cheque for ten thousand for an article on “How I Did It” – film rights reserved.'

But in spite of all these demonstrations of public sympathy, in spite of all appeal, in spite of all the exertions of all the crime experts of all the national papers, in spite of all the police themselves could do, in spite of all the help given them by amateur investigators, in spite of the fact that no woman of sixty or seventy – at least, of those who looked their age instead of looking sixteen or seventeen as most of them did – could venture out in public without attracting immediate attention, no further information could be obtained.

The newspaper men consoled themselves for their own failure by bitterly criticising that of Scotland Yard, and by publishing long, and always ‘exclusive', interviews with everyone concerned.
Sunday Photos
revenged itself, not too effectively, for the virtual abduction of the ‘Up the Garden Path' genius by whisking away Mrs Rice to a remote country cottage where none but their own reporters could find her, and the
Daily Announcer
man complained bitterly to Bobby that someone must have ‘done the dirty', too, about Humphreys, the little local shopkeeper, who for year after year had supplied every week the missing woman's meagre wants.

‘Kidnapped,' said the
Daily Announcer
man bitterly, ‘that's what it comes to. The neighbours say the shop was open as usual one day, and next morning the shutters stayed up – and have stayed up ever since. Seems to be no one there. Can't get hold of the assistant who used to work for him, either.'